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Getting focused

How to learn what material to focus revision on.

You will need to gather all your course material and lecture notes together, and organise them properly. Your course material or texts should contain an overview of your course. Keep this to hand, as it will prove invaluable as you come to identify the topics you will need to revise.

There are also other sources of information that you can draw on when gathering information for your revision. Here are some of our suggestions.

  1. Summary notes made from course texts.
  2. Completed and marked assignments.
  3. Assignment topics you did not choose and accompanying advisory notes.
  4. Audio visual materials (with associated notes if available).
  5. Handouts from tutorials or lectures, exercises and notes.
  6. Specimen or past exam papers.
  7. This gathering process will lead you to realise that you have a wealth of material available for your revision.

Now you will have reminded yourself of the scope of the course, and you will also have a sense of the range and breadth of topics you have covered, so now you need to decide what to revise.

Make a preliminary list of course topics. Then look at past or specimen exam papers to see which of the topics on your list appear, and how often. Having done this, think of the material you have to revise from - is it limited or quite detailed?

You may find that for one topic you not only have an assignment, but also notes from your tutorial, course materials, audio visual material, or supplementary readings. Such a selection points to this being a strong revision topic for you.

Although there is no exact formula for how much you should cover in your revision, it is a good idea to revise more topic areas than the number of questions to be answered. You may find that a particular topic you have revised has a question with a narrow focus or an awkward slant.

It will become clear that certain topics appear on the exam paper year after year. Some topics will have a wealth of material for you to draw on, and other topics will simply be your favourites and easier to learn. It is always a good idea to show your list of revision topics to a tutor or fellow student. You can ask them what they think about your revision plans.

Acknowledgements and thanks…

This work originally comes from the Open University’s Open Learn Materials, and is available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded, remixed and reused. Anyone can link to the website, which it encourages, and if you want to use the materials on your website you need to follow the directions here regarding copyright.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Open University for allowing the IET to reproduce their material in a modified form.